I'm Matt Schifrin vice president and managing editor of Investing for Forbes Media. I have worked for Forbes for more than 25 years and learned business journalism under Forbes’ late great editor Jim Michaels. For the first 15 years of my career, I wrote mostly investigative features but now I am responsible for investing and finance content in Forbes Magazine and on Forbes.com. I'm also editor in charge of Forbes Newsletter Group and Forbes iConferences and I used to run Forbes Best Of The Web. I won a SABEW award in 2012 and a MIN Best of The Web award in 2009. My book, The Warren Buffetts Next Door, The World's Greatest Investor You've Never Heard Of was published in 2011. I am a graduate of Cornell University.

Wine Investing: 3 Blue Chip Bordeaux Bargains

Forbes doesn’t often write about the merits of investing in vintage wine but I recently connected with John Kapon, president and owner of one of the world’s oldest and most active wine auctioneers, New York‘s Acker, Merrall & Condit. John was talking up the virtues of buying certain vintage Bourdeaux’s “on weakness.” He likens it to buying great blue chip stocks on the dips. Below is a guest post from John Kapon, CEO of Acker Merrall:

A no brainer buy, down 35% from its high

VINTAGE TASTINGS

As I sipped on a velvety 1950 Trotanoy, an insider’s vintage from the Pomerol region of Bordeaux, the last thing on my mind was return on investment. That warm spring evening in New York was a tasting to remember. Everything was as it should have been in this spectacular wine, which resonated with aromas of plum, cassis, chocolate and white smoke. There was a rich and mature complexity to its palate that made it that rare work of art that can be enjoyed and experienced. How could you put a price on a moment like this?

And yet, you can. For all its ephemeral beauty, a great wine also makes for a wise investment, and now could not be a better time to venture into the wine market. Today, some of the biggest investment opportunities are in Bordeaux. Why? Because, as any smart investor knows, you buy at the bottom of the market, and Bordeaux recently has hit the skids.

Setting aside the lush and creamy palate of a 1982 Latour, or the spectacular experience of a 1989 Petrus, Bordeaux is also the king of the wine market for economic reasons. It is the number one traded commodity in the world of wine, with roughly a 50% share of the market. It’s traditionally been the most reliable wine investment because of the frequency, volume and consistency that we see fine Bordeaux at auction.

That said, the great investment vintages are expensive, and are more often going up rather than down. Even if you looked at the bottoms of the last decade, they would all point upwards, and significantly. So seize the opportunity while it’s here. We’re facing a rare lull in pricing due to various factors, including the potential European economic crisis, and China taking its foot off the pedal a touch. With strong demand from Asian collectors, prices rose in 2009 and 2010 as much as 40%, and then large quantities of wine came to market accordingly; there was a bit of a gold rush, except it was wine. Supply finally started to exceed demand, and a result, prices dropped as much as 30% over the last six+ months. However, the near and long term demand from China given its continued economic success and growth remains a strong positive for investing in the great wines of the world, in particular the top Bordeaux.

It didn’t help that Bordeaux wine growers have continued to keep their release prices excessively high, even when 2011 wasn’t a particularly great year for Bordeaux, leaving a bad taste in many collectors’ mouths. Some are even boycotting Bordeaux and not buying anything.

But they will be back, and even if they aren’t, the market certainly will. All of the aforementioned factors have combined to temporarily dampen Bordeaux prices. While other wine categories have performed well at auction as interest in Burgundy and other regions has grown, Bordeaux has taken the brunt of the market pressure. But that will change sooner rather than later. History has already taught us that. Following every major stock market crash of the last few decades, prices of Bordeaux fell often in tandem with those stock market declines but often outpaced their recoveries and gains.

There is always calm before the storm, and I fully expect Bordeaux prices to return and exceed their previous highs, although Chateau Lafite Rothschild may not get back to its highs as soon as others. This became the darling of the Chinese wine market, the equivalent of a wine status symbol, so there might have been a bigger bubble there. But history should repeat itself; the same happened at the end of the first wave of the financial crisis in 2008, and it will happen again as wine investors always come back to Bordeaux. No other wine can age a century like Bordeaux.

So as you’re thinking about diversifying your investment portfolio and venturing into wine, here are a few gems to look out for:

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